So, that’s it then: Should the April 7 provincial election go against the ruling Parti Quebecois, which would be a rollicking backfire, it will be deemed the fault of sneaky Ontario-born students, anglophones and allophones all, who’ve turned away from their historical pastime of squandering their parents’ money, procrastinating and swilling beer, to seek the overthrow of Quebec democracy. Who could have credited millennials with such a Machiavellian sense of purpose?

If not for the nasty, “us-versus-them” undertone that we have come to expect from Pauline Marois’ PQ, it would be laughable. Yet that was the latest word from headquarters, as the party wheeled to respond to suggestions that an unusually high number of non-francophones are registering to vote in some Montreal ridings. At a press conference Sunday morning the province’s justice minister, Bertrand St. Arnaud, was wheeled out to ask whether the election might be “stolen” by Ontarians and other undesirables from the ROC. Zounds!

Of course, this is codswallop; the rules for eligibility in Quebec require a minimum six-month residency and an intent to remain in the province. That means most students beyond first year who want to vote can vote, unless there’s cause to believe they’re lying when they say they intend to look for work in Quebec following their graduation, should they, in fact, graduate. But how would such a lie be established? By checking all their Facebook profiles and ferreting out contacts out-of-province? Interviews with former boyfriends or girlfriends? Perhaps the safest thing would be to ban them all outright. Only there’s this other niggling problem:; the island of Montreal itself, with its two million inhabitants, most of whom want nothing to do with the PQ’s dream of independence. Urban Montrealers constitute a quarter of Quebec’s population. What to do about them? Ice floes for the lot?

The flailing over voter registration is further evidence of the depth of the PQ’s malaise, as polls now show the Liberals, led by Philippe Couillard, have opened up a 10-point lead, and have a shot at clinching the very majority the PQ coveted for itself just two weeks or so ago. The latest tally from from poll aggregator threehundredeight.com has the Liberals at 43.1 per cent support, the PQ at 32.8 per cent. If this trend holds, the pollster estimates, Couillard will take between 61 and 76 seats, with 71 the median projected outcome. In Quebec’s 125-seat legislature, 63 are required for a majority.

Should that occur, it’s nigh impossible to see how Marois survives as leader. She chose the timing of the election and will shoulder the blame if the grand strategy fails. It’s also not clear where the PQ itself would go post-loss; much of its former brand, as a party of the centre-left, founded on social democratic principles, has been tossed on the scrap heap. Possibly, the two dominant personalities in Marois’ orbit, Jean-Francois Lisee and Pierre Karl Peladeau, will engage in an epic battle of left versus right, respectively, after which the losing champion’s supporters defect either to the right-leaning and soft nationalist Coalition Avenir Quebec or the left-leaning and separatist Quebec Solidaire. Either way, the PQ is splintered, and either way the separatist dream recedes for the foreseeable future and perhaps longer.

It is far too early to write Marois’ epitaph, of course, the vote being two weeks off. But the turnaround in her and her party’s fortunes has been shocking. The great surprise of the campaign thus far is the extent to which Quebecers have turned thumbs-down on all the renewed talk of a referendum on independence. Two-thirds of respondents, a CROP poll done for La Presse in early March showed, want nothing to do with such a referendum; an equivalent number believe the PQ is determined to bring one about. That’s a terrifically difficult stat for Marois to overcome. Hence her almost frantic effort in recent days to draw attention away from independence and towards the charter of values.

Her problem is that the charter is not, actually, a channel-changer; as a Quebec identity question, bound up in discussions of race, religion and ethnicity, it’s inexorably related to the independence question. Any discussion of one leads to the other, and vice versa. To truly change the channel, Marois would have needed, in the debate last Thursday, to either break new ground on the economic file or rock Couillard with an attack on his or his party’s ethics. She tried, but without much success.

And that, of course, may turn out to be the game-changer: that Couillard, though a new leader with no experience in televised debate turns out to be impressive on his feet. If he can maintain his aplomb in the second debate, on March 27, he may close the deal. In the meantime, he need only continue to do what he has been doing: focus relentlessly on the PQ’s drive for independence and allow it to do his work for him, by cementing its reputation for wonky intolerance.

I am a national political columnist for Postmedia News. My work appears in the National Post, on Canada.com, the Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Halifax Chronicle-Herald... read more and Vancouver Sun, among other publications. I write primarily about national politics and policy.View author's profile